Ridegear Guybrave (Playstation)

It's a beat em up, and it's not an arcade game, or on a console released before 1994! So, I'm sure you all know what's going to happen, and yes, there are both experience points and equipment shops. But it's not all bad, as the weapons you buy actually all have not only their own models that actually appear on your robot, but their own animations too! So you are actually getting a bit of fun out of them besides the numbers going up.

And yes, it's also a game about robots. Giant ones, though they're also super-deformed. Which is probably actually more realistic than big tall, slender mecha. The setting is an island in what I assume is some kind of newly colonised frontier world, as everything manmade seems kind of ramshackle, though there isn't any of the environmental devestation you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic world, with stages taking place in deserts, plains, caves, forests, meadows and so on.

The RPG elements don't just stop at the stat-raising stuff, either: there's towns where you talk to people, buy stuff, and so on. In fact, the towns conspire with the game's navigation system to create some offensively aggregious padding, which actually detracts from the game's quality a lot more than the stats stuff. There's a point early on in the game, where you have to talk to a guy in the second town, then go back to the first town to talk to another guy, then return to the original guy in the second town. The problem with this is that there are two stages between those two towns.

Now, the game's world map doesn't let you just pass over cleared areas, but instead, each area, whether it's a stage or a town, has two exits, one at the left and one at the right. When you leave via one exit, you can only go to the opposite exit on the next stage in that direction. So, how the above quest goes is that you initially leave the first town, and go through the two stages to get to the second. Then you leave the second and go through those two stages again, but backwards, to get back to the first town. Then you have to go through those same two stages for a third time to get back to the second town. I can't remember the last time I played a game with such little respect for the player's time. The combat was actually pretty fun at first: crunchy and satisfying, and with the novelty of trying out new weapons now and then, but after this nonsense, I'd lost all goodwill I once had towards this game.

I think if me and my friends had gotten copies of this from our local totally legitimate import games dealer around the time of its release, it might have been one of our favourites that we'd occasionally talk about to this day. As a more discerning adult with access to emulation and so on, I can't recommend it. If you want action games with nice low poly robots and cool anime character portraits, you can easily find many others that are a lot better than this.

Logic Pro Adventure (Arcade)

The original Logic Pro was one of the first games ever featured on this blog, all the way back in 2009. Back then, I said it was the only nonograms game to make an actual interesting videogame out of the concept, by adding a strict time limit, with penalties for trying to fill in the wrong squares. In the nine years since, I've played a few other games, old and new, and it's still true that Logic Pro (and its sequels) are the only ones really worth your time.

Logic Pro Adventure is the second sequel to the original, and it mostly works the same as the first: you solve nonograms, there's a time limit, you lose a big chunk of time if you try to fill in an incorrect square. Also like the first, you get limited-use items to help you when you can't get a handle on a puzzle. The "cross clear" item from the first game, that reveals all the squares in horizontal and vertical straight lines emanating from the cursor's current location is back, and accompanied by a bomb that reveals a five-by-five square surrounding the cursor. There's also little coloured spheres that randomly appear as you play, that seem, at first, to just be points items, though they're a little more strange than that.

The stages are split into sets of three, identified by colour, and if, in the course of completing a set of stages, you collect fifty of those orbs, you'll instantly be taken to the next trio of stages. It's a really strange mechanic, and it seems odd to me that an arcade game would add a mechanic that just makes completion quicker and easier like this, with no real downside. As it is, this might be the easiest one credit completion of an arcade game I've ever had! There is actually some replay value, though: as you might expect, the stages are randomly chosen from an unseen pool, so every game is slightly different. However, there are three characters to choose from at the start of the game, and I'm pretty sure that each character has a totally different pool from which puzzles are drawn. Other than that, there's no difference in how they play, other than having different sound effects and endings.

There's not much more to be said about Logic Pro Adventure. If you like nonograms, then it's probably the best videogame about solving them that's out there. If you don't, then you're not going to have any interest in it at all anyway. So let that be your guide as to whether or not you go and play it, I guess.